Cult of Zir and Ogo Eion released a krauty abstract ambient soundscape album Shortwave Ministry for Theatre Noir today. Check it out.
Technoccult TV interview with Nolon/Cult of Zir, and Cult of Zir live at Pocket Sandwich.
Ogo is the artist behind the Technoccult Renegade Futurist t-shirt. Check out his other designs here.
Dbasr introduction video from Joshua Ellis on Vimeo.
I saw a demo of this a few months ago, and it’s great. It’s like WordPress but with very band-focused features – you can manage not just blog posts, but mp3s, photos, videos, and associate content not just by date or category but by show/gig. You could either use it to self-host your site, or use a hosted service.
You can help fund the project here.
My interview with Josh (not about Dbasr) is here.
Chris Arkenberg continues to rack-up the interviews:
You’ve released a number of projects under various names. Would you talk a little about these projects and your aliases? Do your avatars embody & express your art in some way?
I suppose they do, man. They definitely embody the fact that my interests are intense and short-lived, that I tend to give all my content away for free, and there’s also a strong whiff of the stubborn stupidity I’m known for. I’ve made music as Wombaticus Rex, as Humpasaur Jones, and as Algorhythms, as well as way, way too much other stuff. I’m somewhere between 50% and 90% of DJ Multiple Sex Partners, depending on the vintage. The Hump Jones project was dangerously stupid, I was really pushing the Total Sexual Freedom meme past legally safe boundaries there, although I will probably still publish the book, Human Sexuality for Filthy Apes, that I was preparing for that. It makes me sound like more of a perv than I am, but that entire project was borne out of a single joke instructional song about anal sex. In retrospect, it was good, loving advice and I stand by it, so perhaps it was not a joke track after all?
Oregon Music News interview with Pulse Emitter, one of my favorite noise artists:
What or who was it that inspired you to start making the music that you do as Pulse Emitter? What attracted you to the world of modular synths?
It was a desire to not play in groups any longer and also to stop making music with beats. The start of the project coincided with the first synthesizer module I made, a Paia VCO. This was around 2003. I had become uninspired by the synthesizers I owned and wanted an analog synth but could not afford one at the time. Interest in synthesizers is part of what motivated me to start going to electronics school and that gave me the courage to start soldering. Building a modular was the best way I found to get the sounds and flexibility I wanted, cheaply.
You’ve released an impressive amount of music over the years. How much of it is prepared/written ahead of time and how much of it is improvisational?
My early recordings are more improvised. I don’t do that anymore. I used to record an entire album in a night or two. Now it takes months. I’m a little ashamed of how prolific I used to be, but those releases were in extremely limited editions anyway. I really take my time now.
Electronic musician and artist Donald Baynes, aka FSK1138, spent 10-12 hours a day exploring 3D virtual worlds in 1996 and 97. But now he spends less than 3 hours a week online. He spent an hour of his weekly Internet time chatting with me from a park to tell me why he decided to unplug.
Klint Finley: You say you were “addicted” to virtual reality in the late 90s. How did you get started with VR and what were you doing with it?
FSK1138: During that time – I was what you would call cyberpunk – I spent days plugged into a body suit, data glove, and HMD [head mounted display]. I explored virtual worlds and was surfing the web in 3D. Searching, always searching, for others and A.I out there in the sea of information.
What sort of equipment were you using?
Virtual io HMD, Nintendo Powerglove, dual cpu pPRO.
Did you have broadband back then or was this on dial-up?
I was using dial-up but I moved to Toronto because there was faster Internet – this thing called ISDN.
I remember ISDN. Basically it was using two phone lines to achieve faster speeds, right?
Yes. It was a dream – so much faster. It made 3D surfing VRML [Virtual Reality Markup Language] a reality.
So you were surfing VRML sites then? What were those virtual worlds like back then?
Low rez – like Quake or the first DOOM but at the lowest settings. There was a whole underworld of VRML BBS sites at the time.
And what did you typically do on the BBSes? Chat, socialize?
Chat, socialize, share data – much like what people are doing right now but like the Sims or SecondLife.
Are you still using VR?
No – I think it is a very bad thing. Even back then 3D was considered bad for your eyes and brain. I don’t think we were made for this type of input.
What makes you say that?
The reaction of any one who has seen avatar – when people who have seen it talk about it they always seem to have a smile on their face – the same smile…
He later sent me this article mentioning health concerns surrounding prolonged 3D gaming in children
You say now use the Internet for less than 3 hours a week and do not own a TV, phone, or stove. What brought you to the point that you decided you had to unplug like that?
I lived in Guyana for 4 years. You can have days when you have no power, and I survived. I feel that people think that the Internet will always be there. I feel it will not and the day is coming soon. I have seen the Internet change over the years – it has changed alot. The day is coming, I feel, that the can not remain a free utility.
Life really is not hard without technology if you learn to live without it. But if you’re addicted – what then?
When did you decide to cut back your use of technology?
When I realized it was taking up so much of my time – 2007 – I started closing down websites that I was using. I cut back to Myspace and YouTube – there were so many. And I cut my surfing – I use RSS now, I do not surf. By 2008 I did not have a landline or cell or Internet at home.
Above: Video FSK1138’s “Catch the Man,” a cover of Front 242’s “Headhunter.”
It looks like you use a lot of technology to make your music – have you thought about going towards a more low-tech approach to making music?
I am in a way back to where I started with making music. When I could not get a sampler or computer I used found objects – metal and glass and things you could bang together to make noise.
So you’re not using computers for music music any more?
I am using computers still – I just did a track for The 150-Years-of-Music-Technology Composition Competition.
Do you have any opinions of augmented reality? Have you used any AR applications?
I think is a cool concept. I just hope it doesn’t become the next form of spam.
Above: Video for FSK1138’s “Digital Drug”
Untitled Pulse from Ogo Eion on Vimeo.
Above: Video experiment by Ogo Eion with music by Pulse Emitter.
Dead Fingers Talk is an ambitious forthcoming exhibition presenting two unreleased tape experiments by William Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.
Few writers have exerted as great an influence over such a diverse range of art forms as William Burroughs. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Junky, continues to be regularly referenced in music, visual art, sound art, film, web-based practice and literature. One typically overlooked, yet critically important, manifestation of his radical ideas about manipulation, technology and society is found in his extensive experiments with tape recorders in the 1960s and ’70s. Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs is the first exhibition to truly demonstrate the diversity of resonance in the arts of Burroughs’ theories of sound.
Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs
Arthur Magazine has just posted this interview from 2006 on their blog:
Arthur: One of the weird things, from what I can tell about the performance environment in America, is that one of the few places where people of all ages can see quality music in a live setting now is the record store.
Yeah. “Quality music.” One thing that I had started to think about before we started on this topic was… like, how old are you?
Arthur: 35.
I’m 36, and my sense is that, if you won’t take offense, is that we are out of touch. There are quality shows going on six out of seven nights a week that are all-ages shows, in people’s houses, in public places, and we just don’t know those bands. Because I’ve seen some this year—I’ve seen some every year. And it’s like, Whoa, where’d these kids come from? And these kids came from the same places we came from, and they’re making great music that we don’t have access to, because… It’s the same way that bands that I went to see play 20 years ago, people who were 22, to 36, to 50, they would be saying ‘There’s just no music going on these days. There’s no shows like I remember.’ And meanwhile, I was having the fucking time of my life!
I think about this every time I see some blogger or columnist lament that there is no alternative culture any more. It’s almost always someone over 30 – often over 40.
ALSO:
Portland’s all age venue The Parlour, run by a buncha swell guys, needs support to carry-on. They’re accepting donations by Paypal at the e-mail address drpfenderson@pinkonbrown.org
(I play at this venue often, and they sell my wife’s crafts, so it would be a big help to us if they survived!)
New essay up at Mediapunk:
It’s difficult to estimate the total number of Juggalos. The 2009 Gathering of Juggalos had 20,000 people in attendence. The most recent ICP album sold about 50,000 copies in the first week. But let’s be conservative and go with the 20,000 estimate. (I actually suspect it’s much higher than this.)
Nightline cites only 3 instances of reported Juggalos actually murdering anyone. To be charitable, let’s assume there are 10 people who are both Juggalos and murderers. That would mean AT MOST .05% of Juggalos are murderers. Granted that’s a significantly higher percentage than the US population at large (there were 16,272 murders in 2008 and the US had a population of about 305 million). But less than 1%, at most, isn’t exactly cause for alarm. And I would think Arizona’s finest would be better served by realizing that 99.94 percent of murders are committed by non-Juggalos and adjusting their law enforcement priorities accordingly. (As I write this, the number of murders committed per year by Toby Keith fans is currently unavailable.) […]
And a preemptive response to the inevitable jokes about how Juggalos (re: poor rural teenages who don’t fit in) deserve imprisonment, death, or worse for their fashion-sins: go right right ahead and fuck off and die already.
The project has finally been confirmed. Patton and Broadrick are both attached to Unearthing, “a bewitching story written and narrated by Moore set against an epic score”. Although the soundtrack is led by Crook&Flail, a partnership between Fog’s Andrew Broder and rapper Doseone, there are a slew of cameos, including Hella’s Zach Hill and Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite. “It is about, uh, a co-worker of Alan’s and somehow seemingly about Alan himself,” Doseone told Pitchfork last year. “And it’s about the comic industry, the world of magic, the world we live in, the world we don’t live in.”
Also, last I heard Moore said the Gorillaz project had been “overblown,” but now it appears to be moving ahead:
Moore presently has his fingers in another musical pie – a team-up with Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewitt. The trio are collaborating on an opera about John Dee, a mathematician and mystic who advised Queen Elizabeth I. In an interview this week, Albarn said he is doing his homework, reading “Euclid and Pythagoras and all of that stuff”. We hope Moore is holding up his end of the bargain, and is listening to Parklife and the Good, the Bad and the Queen.
Guardian: Alan Moore collaboration with Faith No More’s Mike Patton confirmed
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